Bruce D. Bartholow

My research generally focuses on two broad but related areas. First, I am interested in basic aspects of social cognition including priming (i.e., construct activation), automaticity and control, and cognition-emotion interactions. Much of our work also investigates the acute effects of alcohol on these processes. Alcohol is known to cause a number of cognitive impairments and affective changes that lead to deficits in behavioral control, many of which have implications for social behaviors (e.g., aggression, risk-taking). Contemporary models of many social-cognitive phenomena emphasize the role of cognitive and behavioral control in social behavior. Thus, studying the effects of alcohol on social cognition provides a way to understand not only the implications of intoxication, but also the function of various cognitive mechanisms that are important for flexible, adaptive social functioning.

The second broad line of research in the lab examines how environmental factors and individual differences (e.g., alcohol sensitivity, executive cognitive function) contribute to alcohol involvement among young adults, and how neurocognitive reactivity to alcohol-related cues might predict vulnerability to alcohol use disorder.

In most of our research, we employ a combination of behavioral and psychophysiological measures (especially event-related brain potentials; ERPs) to provide a broad basis for understanding how environmental contingencies and stimulus events are interpreted and processed at a basic neurocognitive level, and how these basic processes mediate or explain overt behaviors.